Chapter 5: A New Addition to the Family
The white flash hadn't fully faded from Uriel's mind when Galatina's head snapped toward the kitchen.
"...The pot."
He didn't even understand what was happening before she was already moving.
"Mom?"
"Something's been simmering on the stove."
Uriel looked toward the kitchen window. A thin thread of smoke was curling out of it, dragging with it the unmistakable scent of something charred and deeply regretted.
Again.
"Go keep her company," Galatina called back, already halfway through the door. "When she wakes up, give her some broth. Don't let her move around."
She paused on the threshold and glanced back over her shoulder.
"Having a little sister around might be nice."
Uriel said nothing.
A little sister. An elf one, at that. Honestly, not bad.
She vanished into the kitchen. But her voice drifted back out a moment later, warm and unhurried, the way she said everything — like she was commenting on the weather.
"And if she and my little Uri end up together someday, well, that works too."
Yeah, marrying — that's not —
Uriel's feet stopped moving.
Hold on. How did we jump straight from 'little sister' to 'wife' in one sentence?
He stood in the doorway of the storage room, replayed the last thirty seconds in his head, confirmed he had heard correctly, and drew a long, slow breath.
"Mom." Uriel pitched his voice just a bit louder. "I am eight."
"Eight," he repeated. "Eight years old. She looks about seven or eight. We're both kids. Marriage is not —"
"Mm," came the placid reply from the kitchen. "That's why you raise her first. See if you like each other. See if she likes you."
Uriel opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
...It's Mom. There is no winning this. She's joking. She has to be joking. ...Right?
"...'Raise her first,'" he muttered under his breath. "That's... not how normal people say it." He shook his head. "Whatever."
He turned around and walked back into the storage room.
---
The girl lay still under the blanket, her lashes resting lightly against her cheeks, like dew on grass. Her breathing was shallow but steady — nothing like the wet, wrong sound that construct of rotting flesh had made.
Alive. Good.
He looked at her and started thinking.
Elf. About my age, probably. Is this a curse? An experiment? Was she being used as a medium?
And when she wakes up — what exactly am I supposed to tell her?
He pushed himself up and rummaged through a corner of the shed, returning with a pair of trousers and a linen shirt he’d outgrown last year. After neatly folding them beside her, he sat back down, crossed his arms, and got his brain working.
The situation was simple enough, at least in theory. She was a child who had just woken up in an unfamiliar place, looking at an unfamiliar face, with the traces of Curse Power still written across her skin. She needed to be calmed down. She needed a story she could believe.
He ran through three different versions in his head. Scrapped all three.
First rule: absolutely nothing about Mom.
I'm eight years old. She's roughly eight years old. If this world has some kind of — isekai police — wait, Holy Knights, the term here is Holy Knights — kicking the door down and hauling me away, I am not explaining that one.
But having a companion was a good thing. One person alone wasn't safe. He'd already decided that much.
The girl's eyelashes moved.
Uriel smoothed his expression in an instant. He straightened his back, arranged himself into what he hoped read as calm, reliable, not at all threatening, and waited.
Her fingers curled slowly against the edge of the blanket. Then, with the careful heaviness of someone surfacing from a long way down, her eyes opened.
She saw Uriel.
She scrambled backward. Her spine hit the wooden wall with a dull thud, the blanket half-slipping from her shoulders. She yanked it back up and stared at him — eyes wide, every instinct visibly on high alert.
Uriel took stock of this reaction and made a quick decision.
The truth? No. "You dissolved into a grey-purple mass of rotting flesh and my mom carried you back through the forest by one hand and peeled you out like a fruit" — there is no tone of voice that makes that land well.
Half the truth? Worse. She'll have follow-up questions.
He cleared his throat. And with great personal effort, he forced his eight-year-old voice into something approximating worldly, unshakeable authority.
"Hey, you. You're finally awake."
She stared at him. Gave a small, tense nod.
I'm not good with children. Technically we're the same age, but that's beside the point.
He thought of the hero stories Mom used to tell him.
...Maybe I can work with that.
"Don't be scared." He raised both hands, palms out, showing they were empty. "You're safe here."
She didn't relax, but she stopped pressing herself into the wall.
"You ran into some trouble," he said, keeping his voice level. "The water supply in your area was contaminated. Someone poisoned it. Anyone who drank it would..." He paused, weighing turned into a grey-purple heap of decaying biomatter against something a normal child could process. "...start screaming like a maniac and then turn into a monster."
He bared his teeth, stuck out his tongue, and made a face.
Her eyes went a little wider.
"The poison makes you lose consciousness," he continued, face returning to neutral. "And then you start hurting the people around you. That's what happened to you."
Her lips moved. Her voice came out rough and dry, like it hadn't been used in a long while.
"...Then I'm...?"
"Fine," Uriel said. "You were rescued."
He had almost said by my mom. He caught himself just in time.
How would I even phrase that? "She scooped you out of a pile of rotting meat with one hand"? "She lugged that thing through the forest like a bag of groceries"?
He squared his shoulders, cleared his throat, and channeled his best, most worldly tone—doing everything in his eight-year-old power to sound like a grizzled veteran.
"You were saved by the sole heir to an ancient Sage's bloodline," he declared. "The Witch."
"...A Sage? A Witch?"
"Mm." He tilted his head toward the kitchen. "She has her methods. Don't worry."
The girl went quiet. She looked down at her own hands. The grey-purple veining hadn't fully faded. She stared at it for a moment, then looked up.
"...I don't remember what happened to me. Any of it."
"That's normal," Uriel said. "The poison suppresses memory from the affected period. Honestly, forgetting is the better outcome."
Another silence.
The wariness in her eyes faded, piece by piece, until it was gone.
Uriel nudged the folded clothes toward her. "Get dressed. The, uh —" He glanced at the blanket. "It's better if you're not just wearing that."
She looked down at herself. Her face went red. She pulled the blanket tighter and gathered the clothes without a word.
Uriel turned his back and waited.
---
The old linen shirt was too big on her. The sleeves swallowed her hands. She looped the drawstring around her waist twice and knotted it into something functional, if not exactly fashionable. She smoothed the collar and looked at the back of Uriel's head.
"...What's your name?"
"Uriel." He turned back around and met her eyes. "Yours?"
He had almost said "the Witch's apprentice" or something to that effect. He held off.
She hesitated. Looked down. After a moment, shook her head.
Either she genuinely didn't remember, didn't want to say, or maybe a bit of both.
Uriel thought for a moment.
Elf. Green hair. A name that fits.
"Then I'll give you one," he said. Naturally. Like this was obvious. "You're an elf. Green hair."
The name left his mouth with zero fanfare.
"Lumina."
She looked up and repeated it quietly, like she was testing the shape of it.
"...Lumina?"
"Mm. It's an elven name. Means light." He held her gaze. "It suits you."
A short silence. Then the corner of her mouth curved — small, a little shy.
"...It's pretty."
Uriel sat back down across from her.
"Have you heard of the Witch Brigade?"
She shook her head.
"A group," he said. "We handle problems like the one you ran into — places corrupted by Curse Power, people caught in the crossfire."
"...Who's in it?"
"Us." He let the word sit for a beat. It came out surprisingly naturally. "The Witch Brigade."
I sound exactly like someone lying to a small child.
...Kind of fun, though. He very deliberately omitted the part where his current job title was essentially errand boy.
Lumina watched him. Something in her eyes had shifted — not just the cautious hope he'd expected, but something else underneath it.
"...Do you take people in?"
Uriel nodded, satisfied.
Uriel didn't notice — there was something else in her eyes beneath the cautious hope. Like she was looking at someone barely older than herself, someone she couldn't quite figure out.
"We do," he said. "Welcome to the Witch Brigade."
---
From the kitchen, a familiar voice floated over.
"Little Uri~ Dinner's ready — bring the little miss too~"
Uriel stood, walked to the doorway, and paused. He glanced back over his shoulder.
"Let's go. The Witch summons."
Lumina blinked. She looked down at the oversized shirt, gripped the too-long sleeves in both fists, then stood up and followed.
The two of them stepped out of the storage room into the yard. The sun had started its long lean toward the horizon.
Uriel walked ahead. Lumina walked a step behind. Like siblings.
A story invented on the spot, mostly to keep a frightened girl from panicking. With, admittedly, a small personal indulgence folded in.
The Witch Brigade. A name he'd made up thirty seconds ago.
Well. Good enough for now.
There was still a lot to figure out.
But first — dinner.